River Restoration is essential #ClimateAction . Never gets proper attention. It's a driver of soil loss & ecosystem change that will be our undoing if we don't address it in our efforts: Stream Incision can't be ignored. img cred: @WIWetlandsAssoc & http://beslter.org  1/?

First off: hey fluvial geomorphologists, this is meant to waaaay simplify things. It's a starting place for better centering your work in the discussion of climate change. 2/? (image by @geo_coe )

Let's start by talking about some of the zones in the landscape that relate to rivers.

The river has a channel,
Beside it is the floodplain
Above that, are the uplands.
The water in the river is only the visible part of the entire water draining through the landscape above. 3/?

Rivers & Streams are fascinating systems, I recommend reading & learning about them... I'm focusing on one part. A favorite writer on the topic is Luna Leopold, Aldo Leopold's son. Famously he coined the term "Riffle" when he was a child because he couldn't say "ripple" 4/?

Wading in, One way to think about rivers is that they are not just water. They are a system that moves Water, Sediment (from silts to boulders), & also Seeds (which colonize and hold onto material and can actually allow for some interesting corrections in the stream pattern. 5/?

Remember water holds solar energy:
evaporation lifted water from salty seas and it was deposed clean & with elevation onto the landscape.
So it has solar energy stored as chemical potential & physical potential energy. That energy drives everything. Where does it go? 6/?

The energy in rivers can be described as "Steeper and Deeper" means more energy. The slope of the landscape and the amount of water allow for work to be done. 7/?

the energy in water:
1st allows it to overcome its own attraction- so it can be liquid
2nd allows it to overcome its own surface tension- so it can flow
3rd. allows it to move sediment starting with silts& moving up to boulders!
4th. it starts eating at banks & channel 8/

Here is Lane's Balance model: (img from @USDA_NRCS)
what this says is that erosion& flooding are opposites; A river tries to balance its energy with its work. If it doesn't have material to move in proportion to its slope, it will adjust until things are balanced again 9/?

for example, slope can be understood as "rise over run" so a river may meander and curve until it has a slope that balances it's energy. Landscapes are shaped by these dynamic balancing acts. 10/?

Rivers are shaped to balance water, sediment, slope. One balance is holding capacity. A healthy river is shaped so as to countain only the amount of water that keeps balance; won't erode the stream. Any more than that goes out to the flood plain where it slows& drops sediment 11/

the floodplain takes care of the extra energy of a larger rain event, it absorbs it and hydrates and fertilizes the landscape. It turns out that the regular size of a rivers "bank full" is about a 2-year recurrence interval flood. 12/

Ok I think we have gathered enough tools & ideas to get into the big thing I want to discuss: Incision. (img By Stephencdickson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34242959) 13/?

1st. size of streams & rivers has been artificially changed. In the PNW, logs were forced down streams by tempory splash dams that scoured out rivers. (By Unknown - Harry Stephenson, Sr. "History of Little Pine Valley", 1992, page 104., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4632277) 14/

rivers have also been channelized w/ flood-control structures to protect homes& farmland. The rescult is that the holding capacity is a lot greater. In addition, changes in development,loss of organic matter in soils means water moves quicker on land, filling rivers quicker 15/

What happens when there is more water at once? & it is allowed to stay in the channel? Well, it can do extra work with all that focused energy! Let me Introduce the "Channel Evolution Model" once the balance is changed, the river will just start digging in until it hits rock 16/?

if it is ever stopped by rock, it will carve into the banks and form a new, lower flood plain and stabilize (maybe.)
But: as the drain of the watershed, the water table of the entire landscape follows it down. (img from http://bit.ly/2smS4h3 ) 17/?

So many landscapes around us are out of balance. Rivers & streams ready to carve into the earth & change the large landscape into something with a lot less water. Grasslands into desert, wet forests into drier. there is a LOT of soil carbon at stake image: http://bit.ly/2FsZXJo18/ 

i've done a back of napkin estimate a while back for what the current top foot of soil carbon would mean if added to the atmosphere. And it roughly brings everything to 1200 ppm. Incision is a runaway process that will continue if we don't take responsibllity for it 19/

We actually have a lot of ways to deal with it. They include:
1. Changing the water-storage ability of the uplands through ponds, permeable surfaces, swales, soil& vegetation. We can change our land-use and help balance the river system. img from PA Yeomans 20/

2. We can artifically shape new flood plains to stop the deepening & do the work of reconnecting rivers to flood plains. Or even connect rivers to oxbows and old channels that are curvier.21/

3. We can put structures made of rock, wood, and living plants that help the stream. These are great for emergencies as well as context that are hard to introduce beaver to. Because beaver will do all this work if allowed to and given proper support. 22

4. that beaver idea isn't a joke. We can restore so much of this by reintroducing beaver, who know how to slow water, improve infiltration, raise water tables. It's not going to work everywhere but everywhere it can, it makes a difference. https://www.fws.gov/oregonfwo/Documents/BRGv.2.0_6.30.17_forpublicationcomp.pdf

I also HIGHLY recommend the work of OAEC in campaigning and advocating for beaver reintroduction in california. https://oaec.org/projects/bring-back-the-beaver-campaign/ 22/

AND this would go so much quicker and smoother if we just empowered those who have thousands of years of cultural history that includes beavers and fishing. Empowering indiganous people in ownership, policy, and co-management means we don't have reinvent how to do this. 23/?

so i'm going to say one more thing that might turn off a lot of people but that process of floodplain connection was maintained by one other force: large hoofed mammals. pics from; http://bit.ly/2QKOHKu  and http://bit.ly/2VM4nRj  24/?

and this makes sense, if the disturbance is big but infrequent, it can keep the system corrected & balanced. In fact, when making new floodplains, river restoration uses compactors including the "Sheeps Foot Roller" that has scores of metal hooves! 25/?

Holistic Management says that if herds of grazers are mostly kept out of streams but used strategicly in the stream, they can help allow for seed establishment, rebuild floodplain connections. NOT the same as letting cows stay in the stream all the time. http://bit.ly/2TMYYrv 

Plugs into all he other things I write about. Regen Ag, Coppice, urban water catchment, staying out of floodplains, keyline. All help water stay longer on hills, stop erosion, help the land-river system find balance. can even make new springs & lift rivers http://bit.ly/2RniAWz 

the threat is huge & restoring rivers HAS to be part of ANY #GreenNewDeal. We need to clean this up now or else the land will drain & desertify.

Just imagine what i would mean to have healthy rivers, water held in good soil, our homes & food systems helping it all happen. Thanks

I'll end this with a nice video from Ben Falk. His swale and pond system was designed to deal with an event the side of a hurricane and it did, and all that water didn't immediately go into the river... it flowed slowly through the land:

and:

here's some research on the capacity of using beaver in Utah

like i said earler, where we can use beaver, we should, and where we can't there are equivallent things we can do

ok one more lol this documentary does a good job of looking at what beavers do, AND what we could do in other places. this is necessary as part of carbon mitigation and reversal.